Whittaker Chambers born Jay Vivian Chambers and also known as David Whittaker Chambers[1] (April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961), was an American writer and editor. As a Communist Party USA member and Soviet spy, he later renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent. He is best known for his testimony about the perjury and espionage of Alger Hiss.

Youth and education

He was born as Jay Vivian Chambers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and spent his infancy in Brooklyn[2], before his family moved to Lynbrook on Long Island, New York, in 1904, where he grew up and attended school.[3] He often returned to Lynbrook as an adult.[4][5] His parents were Laha Whittaker and James Chambers, an illustrator and part of the New York-based "Decorative Designers" group, largely students of Howard Pyle. He grew up in a household which he himself described as troubled by parental separation and the long-term presence of a mentally ill grandmother.[6] Chambers' father had deserted the family and sent them an allowance of $8 a week. Chambers' brother killed himself by drinking a quart of whisky and putting his head inside an oven.[7]

Early in his sophomore year, Chambers wrote a play entitled "A Play for Puppets" for Columbia's literary magazine The Morningside, which he edited. The work was deemed blasphemous by many students and administrators, and the controversy spread to New York City newspapers. Disheartened over the furor, Chambers decided to leave the college in 1925.[7] (From Columbia, Chambers also knew Isaiah Oggins, who went into the Soviet underground a few years earlier; Chambers' wife Esther Shemitz Chambers knew Oggins' wife Nerma Berman Oggins from the Rand School of Social Science, the ILGWU, and The World Tomorrow.[11])

Personal life

In 1930 or 1931,[12] Chambers married the young artist Esther Shemitz (1900–1986).[7][13] Shemitz, who had studied at the Art Students League and integrated herself into New York City's intellectual circles, met Chambers at the 1926 textile strike at Passaic, New Jersey, where she had been working as a reporter. They then underwent a stormy courtship that faced resistance from their comrades, with Chambers having to climb through her window at five o'clock in the morning to propose. Shemitz identified as a pacifist and not as a revolutionary.[14]

The couple had a son in 1936,[14] named John.[15] The communist leadership had demanded that the family abort the first pregnancy, but Chambers secretly refused. His decision marked a key point in his gradual disillusionment with communism.[16] As well, Chambers felt conscious of his wife's Jewish ancestry given what he saw as the leaderships' anti-semitism.[17] The family later had a daughter, Ellen, which Chambers referred to as "the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life."[15]

In a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, Chambers stated that he had numerous homosexual liaisons during the 1930s, starting in 1933.[16] He said that his frequent traveling gave him an opportunity for 'cruising', especially in New York City and Washington D.C.[18] He insisted that he kept these activities secret from everyone, including his communist handlers and his comrades given their negative attitudes towards homosexuality. However, the spy lifestyle was what gave him the opportunities in the first place. At the same time as this, he said that he, like everyone in the movement, had numerous passing affairs with women.[16]

Chambers told the FBI that he gave these practices up in 1938 at the same time he left the communist underground. He attributed this change of heart to his newfound Christianity.[18] Chambers' admissions, given the strong social attitudes against homosexuals in 1949, led to a hostile response.[19]

Communism and espionage

In 1924, Chambers read Lenin's Soviets at Work and was deeply affected by it. He now saw the dysfunctional nature of his family, he would write, as "in miniature the whole crisis of the middle class"; a malaise from which Communism promised liberation. Chambers's biographer Sam Tanenhaus wrote that Lenin's authoritarianism was "precisely what attracts Chambers... He had at last found his church." That is, he became a Marxist. In 1925, Chambers joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) (then known as the Workers Party of America) and wrote and edited for Communist publications, including The Daily Worker newspaper and The New Masses magazine. Chambers combined his literary talents with his devotion to Communism, writing four short stories in 1931 about proletarian hardship and revolt. One of these was Can You Make Out Their Voices?, described by critics as some of the best fiction from the American Communist movement.[20]Hallie Flanagan co-adapted and produced it as a play entitled Can You Hear Their Voices? (see Writings by Chambers, below), staged across America and in many other countries. Chambers also worked as a translator during this period; among his works was the English version of Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi, A Life in the Woods.

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Harold Ware

In 1932, Chambers was recruited to join the "Communist underground" and began his career as a spy, working for a GRU apparatus headed by Alexander Ulanovsky (aka Ulrich). Later, his main controller in the underground was Josef Peters (whom CPUSA General SecretaryEarl Browder later replaced with Rudy Baker). Chambers claimed Peters introduced him to Harold Ware (although he later denied he had ever been introduced to Ware), and that he was head of a Communist underground cell in Washington that reportedly included:[21]

Alger Hiss, attorney for the AAA and the Nye Committee; he moved to the Department of State in 1936, where he became an increasingly prominent figure.

John Abt, chief of Litigation for the AAA from 1933 to 1935, assistant general counsel of the Works Progress Administration in 1935, chief counsel on Senator Robert La Follette, Jr.'s LaFollette Committee from 1936 to 1937 and special assistant to the United States Attorney General, 1937 and 1938.

Marion Bachrach, sister of John Abt; office manager to Representative John Bernard of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party.

John Herrmann, author; assistant to Harold Ware; employed at the AAA; courier and document photographer for the Ware group; introduced Chambers to Hiss.

Nathaniel Weyl, author; would later defect from Communism himself and give evidence against party members.

Donald Hiss, brother to Alger Hiss; employed at the Department of State.

Victor Perlo, chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board, later joined the Office of Price Administration Department of Commerce and the Division of Monetary Research at the Department of Treasury.

Apart from Marion Bachrach, these people were all members of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal administration. Chambers worked in Washington as an organizer among Communists in the city and as a courier between New York and Washington for stolen documents which were delivered to Boris Bykov, the GRUIllegal Rezident.

Other covert sources

Using the codename "Karl" or "Carl," Chambers served during the mid-1930s as a courier between various covert sources and Soviet intelligence. In addition to the Ware group mentioned above, other sources that Chambers dealt with allegedly included:[22]

Julian Wadleigh, economist with the Department of Agriculture and later the Trade Agreements section of the United States Department of State.

Harry Dexter White, Director of the Division of Monetary Research at the Secretary of the Treasury.

Defection

Chambers carried on his espionage activities from 1932 until 1937 or 1938, but his faith in Communism was waning. He became increasingly disturbed by Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, which began about 1936. He was also fearful for his own life, having noted the murder in Switzerland of Ignatz Reiss, a high-ranking Soviet spy who had broken with Stalin, and the disappearance of his friend and fellow spy Juliet Poyntz in the United States. Poyntz had vanished in 1937, shortly after she had visited Moscow and returned disillusioned with the Communist cause due to the Stalinist Purges.[23]

In his last years as a spy for the Soviets, Chambers ignored several orders that he travel to Moscow, worried that he might be "purged." He also started holding back some of the documents he collected from his sources. He planned to use these, along with several rolls of microfilm photographs of documents, as a "life preserver" that would convince the Soviets that they could not afford to kill him.

In 1938, Chambers broke with Communism and took his family into hiding, storing the "life preserver" at the home of his nephew and his parents. Initially he had no plans for giving information on his espionage activities to the U.S. government. His espionage contacts were his friends, and he had no desire to inform on them.

Early revelations

Although he broke with the Communist party in 1937 or 1938 (his later accounts would vary) the 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact was reportedly the final straw in turning Chambers against the Soviet Union. He saw the pact as a betrayal of Communist values, and was also afraid that the information he had been supplying to the Soviets would be made available to Nazi Germany.[24]

In September 1939, at the urging of anti-Communist, Russian-born journalist, Isaac Don Levine, Chambers and Levine met with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle at Berle's home. Chambers was afraid that he would be found out by Soviet agents who had penetrated the government if he were to meet at the State Department. Levine had told Chambers that Walter Krivitsky had begun informing to American and British authorities concerning Soviet agents who held posts in both governments. Chambers agreed to reveal what he knew on the condition of immunity from prosecution.[25] At the meeting, Chambers named eighteen current and former government employees as spies or Communist sympathizers. Many of the names he mentioned held relatively minor posts or were already widely suspected of being Communists. Other names were more significant and surprising, however: Alger Hiss, Donald Hiss and Laurence Duggan, all respected midlevel officials in the State Department; Lauchlin Currie, a special assistant to Franklin Roosevelt. Another member of the ring was said to be working on a top secret bombsight project at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds.

There was little immediate result to Chambers's confession. He chose not to produce his envelope of evidence at this time, and Berle thought his information was tentative, unclear and uncorroborated. Berle took the information to the White House, but the President dismissed it, apparently with little objection from Berle.[26]

Berle notified the FBI of Chambers's information in March 1940. In February 1941 the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky was found dead in his hotel room. The death was ruled a suicide, but it was widely speculated that Krivitsky had been killed by Soviet intelligence. Worried that the Soviets might try to kill Chambers too, Berle again told the FBI about his interview with Chambers, but the FBI took no immediate action in line with the political orientation of the USA which viewed the potential threat from the USSR paltry, as compared to Nazi Germany. Although Chambers was interviewed by the FBI in May 1942 and June 1945, it wasn't until November 1945, when Elizabeth Bentley defected and corroborated much of Chambers's story, that the FBI began to take him seriously.[27]

TIME Magazine

Meanwhile, after living in hiding for a year, Chambers had joined the staff of TIME Magazine in 1939. He started at the back of the magazine, reviewing books and film with James Agee and then Calvin Fixx. When Fixx died in October 1942, Wilder Hobson succeeded him as Chambers' assistant editor in Arts & Entertainment. Other writers working for Chambers in that section included: novelist Nigel Dennis, future New York Times Book Review editor Harvey Breit, and poets Howard Moss and Weldon Kees.[28][29] During this time, a struggle arose between Soviet-sympathizing and anti-Communist staffers at TIME. Chambers and Willi Schlamm led the anti-Communist camp (and both later joined the founding editorial board of William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review). Theodore H. White and Richard Lauterbach led the pro-Soviet camp. TIME founder Henry R. Luce came to support the anti-Communist camp before the end of World War II in 1945.[30] With Luce's blessing, Chambers received a promotion to senior editor in September 1943 and was made a member of TIME's "Senior Group", which determined editorial policy, in December.[31]

By early 1948, Chambers had become one of the best known writer-editors at TIME. First had come his scathing commentary "The Ghosts on the Roof" (March 5, 1945) on the Yalta Conference (where Hiss was a major participant). Subsequent cover-story essays profiled Marian Anderson, Arnold J. Toynbee, Rebecca West, and Reinhold Niebuhr. The cover story on Marion Anderson (December 30, 1946) proved so popular that the magazine broke its rule of non-attribution in response to readers' letters: "Most TIME cover stories are written and edited by the regular staffs of the section in which they appear. Certain cover stories, that present special difficulties or call for a special literary skill, are written by Senior Editor Whittaker Chambers."[32] Chambers was at the height of his career when the Hiss case broke later that year.

It was during this period after his defection that Chambers and his family became members of Pipe Creek Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, about twelve miles (19 km) from his Maryland farm.

The Hiss case

On August 3, 1948, Chambers was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Here he gave the names of individuals he said were part of the underground "Ware group" in the late 1930s, including Alger Hiss. He thus once again named Hiss as a member of the Communist Party, but did not yet make any accusations of espionage. In subsequent HUAC sessions, Hiss testified and initially denied that he knew anyone by the name of Chambers, but on seeing him in person (and after it became clear that Chambers knew details about Hiss's life), said that he had known Chambers under the name "George Crosley". Chambers had published previously using the pseudonym George Crosley. Hiss denied that he had ever been a Communist, however. Since Chambers still presented no evidence, the committee had initially been inclined to take the word of Hiss on the matter. However, committee member Richard Nixon received secret information from the FBI which had led him to pursue the issue. When it issued its report, HUAC described Hiss's testimony as "vague and evasive."

"Red Herring"

The country quickly became divided over the Hiss-Chambers issue. President Truman, not pleased with the allegation that the man who had presided over the United Nations Charter Conference was a Communist, dismissed the case as a "red herring."[33] In the atmosphere of increasing anti-communism that would later be termed McCarthyism, many conservatives viewed the Hiss case as emblematic of what they saw as Democrats' laxity towards the danger of communist infiltration and influence in the State Department. Many liberals, in turn, saw the Hiss case as part of the desperation of the Republican party to regain the office of president, having been out of power for 16 years. Truman also issued Executive Order 9835, which initiated a program of loyalty reviews for federal employees in 1947.

"Pumpkin Papers"

Hiss filed a $75,000 libel suit against Chambers on October 8, 1948. Under pressure from Hiss's lawyers, Chambers finally retrieved his envelope of evidence and presented it to the HUAC after they subpoenaed them. It contained four notes in Alger Hiss's handwriting, sixty-five typewritten copies of State Department documents and five strips of microfilm, some of which contained photographs of State Department documents. The press came to call these the "Pumpkin Papers" referring to the fact that Chambers had briefly hidden the microfilm in a hollowed out pumpkin. These documents indicated that Hiss knew Chambers long after mid 1936, when Hiss said he had last seen "Crosley," and also that Hiss had engaged in espionage with Chambers. Chambers explained his delay in producing this evidence as an effort to spare an old friend from more trouble than necessary. Until October, 1948, Chambers had repeatedly stated that Hiss had not engaged in espionage, even when he testified under oath. Chambers was forced to testify at the Hiss trials that he had committed perjury several times, which tended to impugn Chambers's credibility.

In 1975, the Justice Department released the contents of the "Pumpkin Papers," which showed that of the five rolls of microfilm that Nixon had described as evidence of the "most serious series of treasonable activities ... in the history of America," two rolls are photographs of State Department documents which were introduced as evidence at the two Hiss trials in 1949 and 1950,[34] one roll was blank due to overexposure.

Perjury

Hiss could not be tried for espionage at this time, because the evidence indicated the offense had occurred more than ten years prior to that time, and the statute of limitations for espionage was five years. Instead, Hiss was indicted for two counts of perjury relating to testimony he had given before a federal grand jury the previous December. There he had denied giving any documents to Whittaker Chambers, and testified he hadn't seen Chambers after mid 1936.

Hiss was tried twice for perjury. The first trial, in June 1949, ended with the jury deadlocked eight to four for conviction. In addition to Chambers's testimony, a government expert testified that other papers typed on a typewriter belonging to the Hiss family matched the secret papers produced by Chambers. An impressive array of character witnesses appeared on behalf of Hiss: two U. S. Supreme Court justices, Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed, former Democratic presidential nominee John W. Davis and future Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. Chambers, on the other hand, was attacked by Hiss's attorneys as "an enemy of the Republic, a blasphemer of Christ, a disbeliever in God, with no respect for matrimony or motherhood."[33] In the second trial, Hiss's defense produced a psychiatrist who characterized Chambers as a "psychopathic personality" and "a pathological liar."[35]

The second trial ended in January 1950 with Hiss found guilty on both counts of perjury. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

In 1952, Chambers's book Witness was published to widespread acclaim. The book was a combination of autobiography, an account of his role in the Hiss case and a warning about the dangers of Communism and liberalism. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called it one of the greatest of all American autobiographies, and Ronald Reagan credited the book as the inspiration behind his conversion from a New Deal Democrat to a conservative Republican.[33]Witness was a bestseller for more than a year and helped pay off Chambers' legal debts.

Recent evidence

At Chambers's first testimony before HUAC, he implicated Harry Dexter White as well as Alger Hiss as a covert member of the Communist Party. White died shortly thereafter, so the case did not receive the attention that the charges against Hiss did. Transcripts of coded Soviet messages decrypted through the Venona project, revealed in 1995, have added evidence regarding White's covert involvement with Communists and Soviet intelligence. However, the Venona evidence on Alger Hiss is disputed by some. John Lowenthal has challenged the Hiss-ALES identification in Venona #1822 by the following:

ALES was said to be the leader of a small group of espionage agents; Hiss was accused of having acted alone, aside from his wife as a typist and Chambers as courier. ALES was a GRU (military intelligence) agent who obtained military intelligence, and only rarely provided State Department material; Alger Hiss in his trial was accused of obtaining only non-military information and the papers used against him were non-military State Department materials that he allegedly produced on a regular basis.

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for his contribution to "the century's epic struggle between freedom and totalitarianism."[39] In 1988, Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel granted national landmark status to the Pipe Creek Farm.[40] In 2001, members of the George W. Bush Administration held a private ceremony to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Chambers's birth. Speakers included William F. Buckley Jr.[41] On January 6, 2010, The Medfield farmhouse at Pipe Creek Farm, in which Whittaker Chambers wrote Witness, was severely damaged by a fire that began in an electrical panel at the front entrance of the home.

In 2007, John Chambers revealed that a library containing his father's papers should open in 2008 on the Chambers farm in Maryland. He indicated that the facility will be available to all scholars and that a separate library, rather than one within an established university, is needed to guarantee open access.[42]

Notes

^ Vinciguerra, Thomas. "Ghosts Rest at Whittaker Chambers Home ", The New York Times, March 30, 1997. Accessed September 18, 2008. "But thanks to Sam Tanenhaus's Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (Random House), the controversial anti-Communist crusader has been recalled as a native son of Long Island -- Lynbrook, to be precise, -- where he grew up and to which he returned while working as the embattled foreign news editor of Time magazine."

^ Staff. "A Sad, Solemn Sweetness", Time (magazine), November 17, 1975. Accessed September 24, 2008. "Trilling's first and only novel, published in 1947, made his name known in an unexpected circle—the FBI. Titled The Middle of the Journey, the book described the intellectual torture of a Communist in the process of quitting the party. Reviews which praised its "assurance, literacy and intelligence" aroused the interest of FBI agents investigating Whittaker Chambers' allegations of spying by State Department Official Alger Hiss. Indeed Trilling had shared a class with Chambers when both were Columbia students, and he frankly admitted fictionalizing Chambers' story in his novel."